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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {